Literature

Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-84) was the first African-American woman to publish a book of poetry: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared in 1773 when she was probably still in her early twenties. Because Wheatley stands at the beginning of a long tradition of African-American poetry, it’s worth considering some of her best and

January 24, 2023, 11:00am Today, Chicago-based arts organization United States Artists announced their 45 2023 USA Fellows, a group that includes four Writing Fellows, each of whom will receive an unrestricted cash award of $50,000. Previous USA Writing Fellows include Kiese Laymon, Claudia Rankine, Teju Cole, Alexander Chee, Ocean Vuong, Sharon Olds, and Fred Moten.

January 23, 2023, 2:17pm If you’ve ever dreamed of being cool enough to go to Sundance (same), I’ve got good news for you: you can buy tickets for virtual screenings for only $20 a pop! This year’s fest has an enticing lineup, as always, but we’re a website about books, so we recommend the following

‘Everyday Use’ is one of the most popular and widely studied short stories by Alice Walker. It was first published in Harper’s Magazine in 1973 before being collected in Walker’s short-story collection In Love and Trouble. Walker uses ‘Everyday Use’ to explore different attitudes towards Black American culture and heritage. You can read the story

January 23, 2023, 9:36am Late last week, a new profile of boygenius—the “world’s most exciting supergroup,” in case you didn’t know, consisting of Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker—reminded us all that they are huge book nerds. (They also dropped some new music, but that’s really beside the point.) “Boygenius likes to read, and

My earliest memories are of the apocalypse. As a child I would sit on my grandmother’s knee as she read scripture from the Holy Bible and bellowed end-times prophecy. Stories that revolved around fire, ash, blood, and tribulation, great clashes of angels and beasts and the armies of man, all of it culminating in the

‘Cathedral’ is perhaps the most widely studied of all the short stories of Raymond Carver (1938-88). The story is narrated by a man whose wife has invited her friend, a blind man named Robert, to come and stay with them. Although he is initially uncomfortable and even scathing about their guest, the narrator eventually bonds

The following is from Bridget Pitt’s Eye Brother Horn. Pitt is a South African author and environmental activist who has published poetry, short fiction, non-fiction and three novels (Unbroken Wing, The Unseen Leopard, which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Book Prize and the Wole Soyinka African Literature Award, and Notes from the Lost Property Department).

TODAY: In 1993, Maya Angelou recites her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration.    Ethan Warren considers love, war, and the ethos of James Herriot in the PBS series All Creatures Great and Small. | Lit Hub Film & TV Jared Yates Sexton reflects on growing up with conspiracy theories

Previously, we selected ten poems about fire, but what about fire’s elemental opposite? What are the best poems about ice and icy things, whether the poem deals in literal ice and icy landscapes, or in ice as a metaphor for extreme coldness of some kind? Below, we select and introduce ten of the greatest icy

TODAY: In 1941, feminist literary critic Elaine Showalter is born.    In guns we trust: Paul Auster asks why America is the most violent country in the Western world. | Lit Hub Politics     Why Janet Malcom, after years of aversion to writing about herself, finally did: “She knew better than most that the only thing scarier than

January 20, 2023, 11:01am It’s not hugely surprising, given their songwriting styles, but everyone’s favorite millennial supergroup—Boygenius, aka Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus, and Julien Baker—is really into reading. According to this Rolling Stone cover profile, the first bonding moment between Dacus and Baker was…  …when they played a show together in Washington, D.C. “I came

‘Mother Tongue’ is an essay by Amy Tan, an American author who was born to Chinese immigrants in 1952. Tan wrote ‘Mother Tongue’ in 1990, a year after her novel The Joy Luck Club was a runaway success. In the essay, Tan discusses her relationship with language, and how her mother’s influence has shaped her

January 20, 2023, 11:08am Literary Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for Shannon Sanders’ debut story collection, Company, which Graywolf Press calls “a richly detailed, brilliantly woven collection about the lives and lore of one Black family.” Here’s some more from the publisher about the book, which will be released on October 3: Shannon Sanders’s

January 19, 2023, 1:04pm You’ve known and loved her as Donna Meagle in Parks and Rec and Ruby Hill in Good Girls, and now Retta is set to play a crime-solving Bookstagrammer in NBC’s forthcoming Murder by the Book. This series (brought to us by Good Girls creator Jenna Bans) is about an Instagram-famous book reviewer putting her

‘A Poison Tree’ is one of the poems from William Blake’s 1794 volume Songs of Experience, the companion-volume to his earlier Songs of Innocence. This poem – one of his most popular and widely studied – is about the ways in which anger eats away at us when it is ignored and not addressed, with

January 19, 2023, 10:43am Huge if true: Stanford economics professor Erik Brynjolfsson does not think ChatGPT is coming for our extremely lucrative writing careers. Instead, he predicts that the AI technology will function as a “calculator for writing,” cutting down on the “routine, rote type of work” of writing. As to what writing functions are

January 18, 2023, 9:05am Rumor has it that bestselling memoirist and plain ol’ bloke Prince Harry actually signed a four-book deal—so get ready for three more world-historically intense publicity cycles! As Tom Tivnan, managing editor of The Bookseller, told the Mirror UK: I believe Harry does have a four-book deal, but it is shrouded in